Noucentista Sculpture: Tradition and Primitivism

The processes of recovering and re-reading Noucentisme were consolidated throughout the 1990s in the wake of various timid attempts to remove this cultural and political movement from the oblivion it had fallen into during the latter half of the 20th century . Initiatives such as L’època dels ‘artistes’: Modernisme / Noucentisme in 1991, or the great 1994 Noucentisme: Un projecte de modernitat retrospective helped a series of academic projects focussed on Noucentisme to flourish, all the while establishing the movement’s theoretical and iconographic bases. From the 1990s onwards, the very nature of Noucentisme has been explained via an interesting formula that combines the concepts of tradition and modernity. The interest in tradition - both popular and classical - as well as the adoption of certain elements closer to avant-garde art are two factors that are generally used to frame the birth of this cultural movement. In effect, the vernacular popular culture and Greco-Latin inheritance, together with efforts to create a succinct kind of art, can be used to correctly define a large part of Noucentista production. Thus, Noucentisme would bring together various aesthetic references: from an iconography close to humble and/or rural art, to subjects bearing the classical Mediterranean baggage via the adoption of a typically avant-garde language. As such, the majority of Noucentista artistic production has a traditional component that either  follows a line rooted in Catalan craftwork or meets and fulfils categories such as harmony, balance or order. In addition, it usually seeks to reduces forms and volumes to the bare essential minimum; a typical characteristic of avant-garde art. However, there are certain production trends within Noucentisme that fall outside these concepts. I think that the inclusion of the concept ‘primitive’ in discussions about Noucentisme could enrich the analysis of the trend’s own iconography and perhaps justify the existence of certain lines of creation inherent to it yet that do not exactly match the parameters mentioned previously. In fact, this chapter is suggesting a new reading of the term ‘primitivist’ linked to one of the main elements of Noucentisme: tradition. The ideas expressed here seek to widen the possibilities of applying the ‘primitivist’ concept and to extend its meaning in the two directions - the popular and the classical - that make up the tradition base Noucentisme was built on. Here, quite definitively, we seek to encourage discussion on the topic via the term we have mentioned, which has traditionally only been considered in relation to the production of historical avant-garde, with the aim of contributing to a critical renewal of the cultural movement we are concerned with.